Need Craigslist Flagging Help? We are Always Unique.

Do you really need Craigslist flagging help? Then why are you waiting for? Proflagging.com is excitedly interested to solve all of your flagging problems.

Craigslist Flagging Help

Proflagging has many features to help you get your ads live and avoid common mistakes that lead to the flagging of your ads or even blockage of your account or IP address. At the same time, it is important to feel that Proflagging itself doesn’t guarantee that your ads, accounts or IPs don’t get blocked. The software is only a tool, and there are billions of ways to use it.

This is an important article for you where we will explain the most common mistakes that cause your ads, accounts or IPs to be blocked. And how we can avoid these mistakes. We suggest that you recite this article carefully before starting any campaigns, to verify that your setup is safer.

First, you need to be understood is that there are many possible reasons for your ads to get blocked. The decision-making process is partially similar to fraud prevention algorithms used by payment gateways. There are many factors that are taken into consideration when deciding whether a particular ad is allowable or not. This fact makes it very difficult to develop a step-by-step guide that will work in any situation.

The good thing is – the number of contributing factors is finite. There are only so many things Craigslist or other sites can analyze when making the decision to block your ads. So the attainment in posting is achieved through understanding and watchful consideration of these factors when composing your campaigns.

Before reaching specific sources,

one important point should be mentioned. All Craigslist security appointments were built with two simple targets in mind: one is to ensure that ads are posted by real people (not by the software) and second is to enforce the requirements of Craigslist Terms of Use.

It is a great idea to always keep that in mind, and ask yourself:

(1) Do my ads look like those posted by real legitimate users?

(2) Do my posts look like they are in line with the TOU?

This article will help you to answer these question.

We will split all affecting factors into 2 large groups:

Those that are directly related to the auto posting software.

Those that are not related to the auto posting software.

The first group contains the following items:

Information about browser sessions (cookies, local storage, browser identification). Proflagging manages these automatically to ensure that every post appears as if it was posted from separate computer/browser.

There will be a period of time delays between actions in the posting process. Proflagging manages timings automatically to ensure that the ads are not posted faster than human beings can type in the text or click the buttons.

There are other things to mark that, are the ads exposing itself? Proflagging takes every possible precaution to ensure that it does not expose itself.

We mentioned the first group of factors briefly so that you know about their existence. We won’t go into much detail on them simply because they are already taken care of by the software for you and you don’t need to worry about them.

Craigslist Flagging Help

The second group of factors is much more important because it is directly related to you and your input. That’s where your understanding is really critical to success. Here go these factors:

Geo-correspondence:

There are several items that carry geographical information along with them:

* The city where you want your ad to appear in the listing,

* The city of IP address that is used to post the ad and verify the ad by E-mail.

* The cities already recorded in your Craigslist account that you use to post the ad (if the account has prior posting history), and the city of the IP that was used to create/confirm the account, and

* The city of the phone number that is used to verify the ad by phone (if phone verification is requested).

Ideally, all 5 must match. In reality, the more match – the better.

Let’s take an example. You live in New York and you regularly post ads locally with your account. Now you want to post some ads on Los Angeles. Suppose you don’t even use the software and do everything manually. So you may log in to your Craigslist account from your home computer, select Los Angeles and place your ad, then open your E-mail to confirm it and maybe answer that phone call with the authentication code to confirm your ad. With all these simple actions, you have given plenty of information to Craigslist to analyze and decide whether your ad is allowable or not, and should it be blocked or allowed through.

Here is what you just revealed to Craigslist:

Your IP address is from New York.

You use the account that was created in New York and you posted in New York before with this account.

You want to post your new ad on Los Angels. Here is where the bell starts to ring – Craigslist has found a potential problem. It doesn’t want you to post to a remote location. If you posted to New York before – it expects that you post to New York (or at least to nearby locations) again. But Los Angeles? It looks Suspicious.

We aren’t saying that this post will be blocked right away. Noone knows exactly how Craigslist security works, and this issue alone may not lead to an immediate block. But it will increase some red flags for sure.There is a solution although, to trick Craigslist into believing that you are sitting in Los Angeles. Here is how:

Clear your browser’s cookies so Craigslist can’t detect that you posted from this browser in New York before.

Use IP address that comes from Los Angeles.

Use a new account that was created with Craigslist IP, and wasn’t used to post out on Craigslist.

If Craigslist asks to verify via phone – use CT phone number.

As mentioned above,

(1) is taken care of automatically. Proflagging will also help you with the other 3 items, but it will need to you to provide IP from Los Angeles, phone number from Los Angeles (if required by Craigslist), and a new Craigslist account (optionally, you can ask the Proflagging to create it for you)If all of the above is ok, Craigslist won’t be able to tell that you are posting from New York. No red flags are raised, and your ad has more chances to go through seamlessly.

Proflagging Is One Of the Best Craigslist Software!

Here is how Proflagging can help you with this (just one of many possible setups):

Load your proxies into the Proflagging software. You may have proxies from different cities – perfect, Proflagging will help you manage them.

Load your Craigslist accounts into it and engage every account to the proxy. If your accounts have earlier posting history – make sure that the city of the IP corresponds to the cities posts recorded in the account. If you don’t have accounts – you can ask the Proflagging to create them for you using your proxies, and in this case, Proflagging will automatically engage your accounts to proxies.

Set phone numbers on your Craigslist accounts. The city of each phone number must conform to the city of the IP and account, of course.

Now you can set up a single ad and ask the Proflagging to post it to many cities for you, as many as you have IPs, accounts and phone numbers for. And for each post, Proflagging will automatically select an account from the destination city, will use IP and the phone number from the destination city. Thus making your ad appear fully legitimate to Craigslist.

The above setup is only an example.

There are many other possible ways, depending on your particular situation. We can explain all of that facts.The purpose of this article is not to provide every step-by-step solution, but to give you as much information as possible so you can develop your own working solution using our software named Proflagging and these guidelines.

The number of posts: is the next big factor. Here are the ways to count the number of posts: Per IP address, Per Craigslist account or E-mail account, Per city, Per section/category, Per phone number And combine each of the above with the time frame.

For example, how many posts per day you make from a single IP address? Single account? Etc.

We know from Craigslist TOU that the recommended (allowed) number of posts is one per 48 hours. Roughly, this is the limit you have to consider when building your campaigns. In practice, this may be violated without any obvious consequences. The reason for that is the fact that one IP address does not necessarily represent a single person. There are many cases when a single IP address used by a big office with dozens of employees. Many cellular providers use one IP address per base station or even for the city, and it is shared by hundreds of users. Craigslist has to look on for that and unbind its limits correspondingly. Similarly, Craigslist may apply various restrictions for various cities and sections. For example, cities with very high traffic may have more strict limits on the number of posts than those with just one or two ads per day.

Craigslist Flagging Help

In practice, it is a good idea to experiment with the different number of posts and see what happens. Eventually, you will find the optimal value for your particular case.

Proflagging will be of a big help with this because it has a setting for every case mentioned above.

For example, the number of posts per IP and account that Proflagging will do before changing IP/account. The default is 1 post per IP/account per 48 hours (as per Craigslist TOU, but you can easily change it to whatever you need). The number of posts with the same number of city/section is regulated by the scheduling settings in your ads. The number of posts per phone number coincides with the number of posts per CL account because the phone number is always attached to an account.

One other thing you have to keep in mind is that your IP addresses may be used elsewhere, and/or may have the earlier history with Craigslist.

For example, if you post from your office – definitely it is possible that some of your co-workers or colleagues also post, and they probably use the same IP you used.

Moreover, you may purchase private proxies. But you never know how they were used before, their past owner may have posted thousands of ads on them. And of course, it can be.

If you say that you are posting from your home and your IP is dynamic (that is, changes when you re-connect your modem), it means that before you got your current IP someone else may have used it and maybe posted ads with it, who knows? So with IPs, there is never a 100% guarantee that they are clean and maiden, and you need to account for that.

The next factor is your content. This breaks down to:

The text you use in your ads: In each section, there is usually a list of words/phrases that are not allowed in that section. Be nice and don’t use such words. In certain sections, the length of your ad makes a difference.

For example, if you plan to sell a house, then probably 3-words ads will look suspicious. The text is your responsibility. Proflagging can’t help you here at all – there is no artificial or any other intelligence in our software to determine whether your text looks good or not.

The images- Some sections expect that you post images. For example, real estate ads without an image make little sense. The number of images also makes a difference. It does not mean that adding a number of identical pictures of your house will help you get the ad live. Craigslist will only be able to tell you that the images are identical, better don’t do that.

HTML content- There are many HTML tricks that’s make an ad stand out. These HTML tricks add hidden text to the ad to make it appear as unique to the craigslist security. Most of these HTML content doesn’t work, and if you try to apply them – they will probably trigger some alerts in Craigslist security.

So better don’t try, unless you know what you are doing. See below recommendations on content randomization and uniqueness. And try to use plain and simple text.

Craigslist Flagging Help

The names of the images: At several times we hear from our users that the names make a huge difference. We all know that digital cameras and smartphones have their own naming conventions. You will hear that Craigslist sometimes favors these names. Proflagging will boost you experiment with this, there is a setting to change the naming convention under settings/mutations.

Randomization of text: If you post more than 1 ad per 48 hours, it is very important that they look unique. In another way, even if you use fair accounts, IP, phone numbers and if your geo-correspondence is perfect – then Craigslist will be able to find you with your identical content. The quick-and-dirty way to solve this is to add some random text at the end of the ad – Proflagging will help you with that, search our knowledge base for random text. But we don’t recommend that. There is the much better way is to use tokens.

You will need to put some time initially to set them up, but since, you get millions of unique combinations of your ad that Proflagging will automatically generate for you each time you post. Search our knowledgebase for “tokens” to find out more.

Randomization of images: When you provide unique images, is not as simple as generating unique text, but still possible. One way is to resize an image within some ideal limits on each post. Proflagging has this feature built-in and will resize your images within +-10% when uploading them. Proflagging always confirm you that Craigslist will not be able to do simple matching of the images, as their byte-stream content will be entirely different.

However, this doesn’t help with more unreal or phony AI-based matching algorithms. We are not conscious whether Craigslist uses these or not, but to be protected – Proflagging recommend to just take more pictures of your house than you intend to post in a single ad and then use tokens to rotate these images, thus providing a unique setting for each ad.

ID string in your ads: We saw that sometimes people want to provide contact information in the ad (phone number, address, E-mail etc.). Although your content and images are tokenized properly, each of your ads contains the same exact phone number – you are in trouble. Better place it in the images – it’s harder to find it there using automated algorithms.

Finally, we have come to a declaration that, our Craigslist flagging help service of Proflagging.com will help you to stop flagging of your ads even blockage of your account or IP address. Stay with us for more help you needed.